NOTES INDICATE FILNER STONEWALL

Mayor, staff strategized about keeping information under wraps, aide wrote

Just weeks after campaigning for openness as the “cornerstone of ensuring the public trust,” Bob Filner met with his new mayoral staff to strategize about how to keep information from going public, according to meeting notes obtained by U-T Watchdog.

The effort continued throughout his brief administration, according to notes taken by Lee Burdick, legal adviser and later chief of staff to Filner.

“No one talks to the news media without clearance,” say Burdick’s notes from a staff meeting on Dec. 3, the day Filner was sworn in. The words “no one” were in all capital letters and underlined twice.

The staff was given a stock phrase to tell reporters: “I’m not authorized to speak on behalf of the mayor on this topic.”

Staffers were also told not to discuss politics, government or media on social media.

On Jan. 29, a smaller group met to discuss how to respond to public requests for city documents. Filner was at the meeting, the notes show, as well as then chief of staff Vince Hall, and Kelly Avilés, a top official with Californians Aware, an open government advocacy group. Burdick took notes.

“Do I have a duty to answer a question if I know it?” Burdick’s notes say. “No. Only entitled to docs.”

The legal advice was given because state law gives the public access to certain government meetings and documents, but does not technically require officials to answer questions asked by the public or the media.

The notes also claim that telephone records are “not required to be disclosed,” and says text messages in the Filner administration were to be routinely deleted even though they are public records.

U-T Watchdog sought release of Filner’s text messages on July 15, the same day Filner’s ex-fiancee told the U-T she broke up with him in part because he was “texting other women sexually explicit messages and setting up dates while in my presence and within my line of vision.”

The request was denied last month, with city officials saying that “text messages by their nature are not city records, they do not fall within any local retention schedule, nor are they required to be retained under state law.”

A recent court case in San Jose indicates otherwise — more along the lines of the legal advice spelled out in the Jan. 29 Burdick notes of “technically public records.”

Avilés said she was at the meeting to provide guidance to the Filner administration on how to be more open. She said that she urged at the meeting greater openness and laid the groundwork for a system of responding to requests for records.

“The basis of my representation is more access, not less,” Avilés said.

Absent from the meeting on Jan. 29 was Donna Frye, the former San Diego council member who had come on as Filner’s director of open government.

“I was not included and not told about this meeting by the mayor or any of his staff,” Frye told the Watchdog. “I have no idea what their intentions were. I was not invited.”